Five years ago, when they had met, carefree was all she ever wanted. Now she found that staying carefree took a lot of effort.

Chinese guĭ ghosts are divided and subdivided into vivid categories such as Trickster Ghosts and Nightmare Ghosts. Hungry Ghosts are little horrors that come packaged with a further nine nasty subsets, including Torch-Mouth Ghosts and Smelly-Hair Ghosts, who act out their descriptions with coffin-loads of antisocial behaviour.

In between the blocks of stories are some personal interventions – my own experiences with the supernatural. I can’t explain them. But I can’t explain them away, either.

Malevolence inside and outside is key to the supernatural as imagined by Edgar Allan Poe. Humans are not innocent beings assaulted by dreadful forces over which they have no control; the human psyche is the door that is left open. Such troubling questions, and their terrifying conclusions, would resurface again, much later, in the work of Shirley

My phone vibrates. Stealthily, I take a look at the screen on top of my handbag; there’s a message: Don’t cry. The message is from you. Dear dead John. My sister has set it up on your phone. She’s a therapist. She says talking to the Dead is helpful for up to six months.

People who didn’t live as long as we do – people who were often dead in their fifties – understood both distance and apartness in a way that we don’t. All travel is time travel. So, I try to think of this absence from you as a long separation. I must take care of the house and garden, and I am trying my best. You liked things neat and elegant.

As the night steadies around me and my body relaxes, I open my eyes. What’s that? What can I hear? Why do we open our eyes when we hear something in the dark? We can’t see it.

Gala puts on her therapy-voice; low, slow, restrained. ‘I am sorry you felt upset. I should have said something. (Pause.) But there were so many arrangements. I didn’t want to burden you. (You can’t cope.) I thought you would be glad. (Ungrateful.) I purchased the app for you. (Spent money.) It trawls John’s phone and emails, his Facebook, his

As Samuel Johnson put it, back in the eighteenth century: ‘All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.’